


The Past And The Pending

by evil_whimsey



Category: Ouran High School Host Club
Genre: Gen, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-16
Updated: 2010-09-16
Packaged: 2017-10-11 22:03:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/117593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evil_whimsey/pseuds/evil_whimsey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hikaru and Kaoru at a summer's end.  (Title borrowed from The Shins)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Past And The Pending

They'll visit the summer house for the final time in October. It will be a short visit; just long enough to check that all is tidy after the remodelers left, make certain that the usual furnishings and housewares have been either covered or stored for the season, and that no one's left anything important behind.

The house staff will have managed this already, as they do every year, but every year their mother (for whom attention to detail is less a personal ethic and more a basic hind-brain function, along with respiration and heartbeat) does a personal inspection anyway. Of course she's in Sidney all month, so Kaoru and Hikaru make this trip in her stead.

They will arrive late in the afternoon, just as the sun is sinking into the lake behind the house. Kaoru will carry their overnight luggage, while Hikaru navigates the gravel drive on his crutches. At the porch steps they'll pause together, with the scent of burning leaves curling sweet in the brisk autumn air; standing in the gold-soaked light that warms the stone, stretches out the soft-edged shadows, and turns the grass the color of an antique photograph.

"Help you up the stairs?" Kaoru will offer, shifting his armload of luggage.  
Hikaru will look across the lawn, toward the massive spreading oak where their old wooden swing twists gently in the breeze.

"I'm good," he'll say, and eye the frayed ropes knotted around the lower limb. Still intact after all these years.

*

Hikaru will have to catch his breath in the foyer, after a tipsy touch-and-go up the six front steps. Under his leg cast, it will feel like a million insects are gnawing away at his flesh, and the crutches will have chafed his armpits raw by then. He'll be sweating from his efforts, and the not-quite-broken skin under his shirt will sting, wasabi-hot, from the salt rubbing in.

A few steps ahead, Kaoru will be paused, looking up the wide marble staircase, all the way to the top, where everything fades off into shadows.

"We could still get a hotel, if you want," he'll say. "Or I could call Hunny-senpai. Maybe his staff is still in residence."  
"If you think I'm getting back in that car, guess again," Hikaru will tell him.

"But our room is up there."  
"I'll sleep on the solarium. Put some blankets on that daybed, it'll be fine."

Kaoru will turn then, nod cautiously. "I'll put your bag in there, then."

*

Though winter is not quite come, the house will already be in deep hibernation. Kaoru will feel it in the stillness of the air, the emptiness in every room he passes, and the flat stale echo of his footsteps in the halls. It won't be the same house he remembers from a month ago, or for all the summers as far back as he can remember anything.

It won't feel like their summer home anymore; like the great old oak out front, and the lake in the back, it will be just another anonymously slumbering entity, sinking deep in the cloak of the chill autumn shadows. And Kaoru will shiver at that image.

*

He'll find his brother in the kitchen, every light blazing, rummaging through the gigantic stainless steel refrigerator. Hikaru will have one of his crutches propped precariously against the open refrigerator door, while he slouches on the other.

"Not much in here. Just whatever the staff left," he'll announce.  
Kaoru, peeking over his shoulder, will see cold cuts, a carafe of orange juice, an egg carton, glass dish of what looks like seaweed salad with octopus, and a very respectable quantity of beer.

Hikaru will already have taken one of those for himself, leaving Kaoru to privately debate whether it's worth mentioning yet again, the doctor's advice against mixing alcohol with his pain meds. But in the end, he'll decide he doesn't have the energy for another quarrel over things they both already know. Or for that _look_ Hikaru has been giving him all month, like Kaoru is just another outsider; one of the many Them who couldn't possibly understand Us.

Instead, he'll squeeze in around his brother, grab a beer for himself. The only person to blame for Hikaru's accident was Hikaru himself, and Kaoru will be deciding it's time to do something besides argue or tread eggshells by then.

"I'm going to sit on the deck," he'll say instead. "Wanna come?"

*

The far end of the lake will be a dusky violet smudge by the time they come out, and the water a perfect indigo glaze. Hikaru will lower himself carefully into a deck chair, grateful for the loose floaty sensation in his muscles, signaling that his pain pills have finally kicked in. The beer helps things along, putting him in a place one step off from himself, and a healthy distance away from the constant throb in in his mending leg.

From somewhere out past the water, will come the a reedy honk of a lone goose, echoing across to the sandy beach at the south cove, and off into the black bristling pines to the northwest. No other goose, or bird, or any creature will answer that plaintive note. The lake will be still as a funeral prayer.

Ambivalent toward the recent past, Hikaru will drift in the memory of long-ago childhood summers; lying boneless with his twin in a heap of damp towels and ice cream wrappers, exhausted from hours of bright sun, mischief, and swimming. It was like some other lifetime, when they had lain until the stars came out and the crickets chorused, their ginger-freckled limbs twined carelessly, feeling the wood of the deck radiating that afterglow particular to August evenings; when all the baking heat accumulated from noontime on, gradually seeps away into the night.

He could take off his shoe, put his bare foot to the planks and feel that same invisible radiance. He could, but he won't because by then he'll be too mellow, sunk deep in the cushion of the deck chair, cocooned in a perfectly painless lassitude. He'll finish the last swallows of his beer, and then set the bottle down on the deck before it slips from his fingers.

It won't be like childhood anymore. No matter what he or Kaoru do, that was a world long ended. Gone like the summer from the lake house. And the memories, he will decide, are like the tree swing under the oak out front, with no one to sit, and no one to push. Or the goose across the lake, his call swallowed up by night, because all his flock has flown.

 

[end]


End file.
